In the Loop: Physician-in-training responds to in-flight medical emergency

April 24, 2018

Early last month, Aditya Shah, M.D., a fellow in infectious diseases, was on a return flight to Minneapolis when his medical training at Mayo Clinic was called into action.

Margaret Shields and her husband, Jim Rogers, were on their way home to Wausau, Wisconsin, from London when their flight plan took a frightening turn. An hour into the flight, Jim began experiencing severe pain in his right eye. The pain quickly intensified to the point where Jim didn't know if he or his eye would survive the six-hour flight to Minneapolis. "When he asked me to tell Gracie, our basset hound, that he would miss her, I knew we needed help," Margaret says. "I went up to the nearest flight attendant and said we needed immediate medical attention."

Help came in the form of Aditya Shah, M.D. "When I heard the [overhead] announcement, I immediately went up to the front of the plane to see what was going on," Dr. Shah, an infectious diseases fellow at Mayo Clinic School of Graduate Medical Education, tells us. What he found was Jim suffering from intense and increasing pain in his right eye. "He was wearing an eyepatch over the eye, and as soon as I took that off to see what was going on, blood started spurting out," Dr. Shah says. Read the rest of the story.___________________________
This story originally appeared on the In the Loop blog.